Charming, sophisticated chamber music.

Ted Hoyle, the cellist on this recording that includes two sonatas for cello and piano observes: "Of the four chamber works by Joseph Fennimore on this recording, two are programmatically linked to Marcel Proust's monumental Remembrance of Things Past. For half of the 1970s, Fennimore was obsessed with the work, and viewed the world through Proust-colored glasses. His first composition to reflect its input was the Quartet (after Vinteuil)...Swann in Love is the second homage to Proust. A sonata in one movement, there are two theme groups in the tonic and dominant respectively, development of this material, and a restatement of these themes in the tonic. Fennimore's First Sonata for Cello and Piano is full of epithets as to its interpretation. Both have four movements and modify traditional forms...Dominated by the piano, The Second Sonata with its Spanish cast, is a more complex work. The composer considers the four movements to be elements of a large-scale sonata form in which 'moods, melodic fragments - even keys themselves - are returned to for the sake of their peculiar color.'"

Review:

"...Fennimore's [music] lives its own life, whatever that means and however one senses it: Here beautiful, there thoughtful, filled to bursting with sentiment and gesture that avoid, remarkably, sentimentality or camp...and well crafted....Performed with skill and obvious love." (Fanfare)